by Ali Knight
Mrs Farmley got nine years for manslaughter. I had to testify at her trial. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in court, but it brought back some bad memories. So, at thirty-five did I grow a conscience? Did I go and do good works in the community, did I go into battle for those less fortunate than myself?
No, is the long answer. I’m a striver – we have to be grubby on the way up before we can be magnanimous in our time and money; before we can become better people.
That spring the phone never stopped ringing. However sick I felt about Mrs Farmley, her children and Hal, I found out there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Over the next five years the Blue and White became the go-to destination for anyone with a cheating spouse. I hired Rory, a lapsed young Catholic from rural Ireland who washed up in London, hoping he was far enough away from his parents and eight siblings that his sexuality could remain the only secret his family ever had. The agency began to pull in the dough. I hired Simona, a very well-educated Italian who spoke four languages who couldn’t even get a bar job in Naples, a few years later. Danny had been right, women were in the driving seat now, they were earning their own money, running their own lives, they weren’t standing by or shutting up and putting up with what those they loved did to them. I was rising up on the backs of other people’s broken romantic dreams. Three months after the trial, I hired four more part-time staff.
I was the cocky, mouthy, hard-drinking, cheater-hunting weapon of relationship destruction. Before I find you, I get paid the big bucks, I sometimes hummed to myself.
I had a checklist of success that I measured myself against. I got a result on every case I took on. I was going to expand into other cities. I was looking into partnering with a spy camera store, maybe running a franchise. I’d got a hundred different ideas of how love gone wrong was going to make me rich and happy.
I was healthy, only forty-two, what could go wrong for a sex detective like me?
CHAPTER 5
Alice
Seven weeks and four days before
What a summer I had before me! I was so excited that I sometimes had to squeeze my eyes shut and open them and give a little laugh, because it felt as if a barista was going to overpour the froth on a cappo, or champagne was going to rise up and burst over the rim of its glass. School was over, Trinity term was finally done. The world beckoned and I was ready.
I assessed myself in the mirror in my room, dithering about whether to have my long red hair up or down. I’d put it up, otherwise I looked like a Pre-Raphaelite nutter about to drown herself in a river. Those women were weak. Not a good look for a first day at work. I’d got on the dark skirt and a white shirt with the buttons done up, and pearl earrings that Poppa bought me. When I told the assistant in the shop that I was buying the skirt for my first job she was keen for me to get the red and make an impact, so I bought the black one. You have to know your own mind. I didn’t think it was smart to take career advice from a woman in her thirties who worked a shop floor. I was starting as an intern at Poppa’s company – my eventual company – that day.
I came down into the kitchen; Poppa and Helene were already up. Helene handed me a cup of coffee from the percolator. ‘You ready?’ She smiled and it accentuated the tiredness of her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping, I could hear her slippers with the bunny ears that she insists on wearing scraping on the hall carpet late at night outside my room and creaking in the office across the corridor from my bedroom.
She didn’t hand Poppa a coffee and I noticed that after a short hesitation he went to get his own. Helene was being petty, but then most adults I meet seem to act like children, including my stepmother. Helene is being … I don’t know how to say it … Helenesh. Like a verb! To Helene, I Helene, she Helenes. Definition: a state of suspended, continual agitation. She was uptight, like really uptight. I respected that. Helene likes things just so, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Poppa taught me not to accept second best, and Poppa is a good judge of what is right.
‘We’re quite the family business today!’ Helene said.
Helene went into the office two days a week; she directed some of the profits to charity, which helped reduced the tax bill, or something. It sounded small-scale. I thought Helene should be more ambitious. She certainly had lots of talents and what’s the point in getting out of bed if you weren’t going to try!
Yesterday we all went out for breakfast at a local café and sat at one of the outside tables, watching the crowds walk by. Poppa leaned across and tried to kiss Helene but she pushed him away, snapping ‘don’t’. It was as if she couldn’t bear to have him touch her. They have been married for only six years. I don’t understand marriage. I can look at Poppa’s and I think – is that it? Really? Their relationship was like a balloon that was slowly deflating in a garden the morning after a party.
It made me wonder what Momma and Poppa’s relationship had been like. She died when I was two. I never knew her. I liked to think sometimes that I could remember her laugh, a particular high, short sound, but I know I’ve made it up. I dream about her, and in my fantasies she becomes whoever or whatever I want her to be – astronaut, model, fortune-teller, masseuse. Sometimes friends’ mothers hug me and I think, did my momma smell like that? Did my momma fiddle with her hair like that?
I try so hard, but thinking about Momma made me sad, and I didn’t want to be sad! April 19th. That was the date she died. A late frost made Poppa come off the road on a bridge and into a river in flood. It was an accident, but there have been nasty people who have tried to make trouble with it, some girls who should have known better.
Liana Boothroyd was one. She sat behind me in Latin and didn’t like me getting all the teachers’ attention. I was called Hitler at school, most likely because I always had my hand up to answer the questions. I heard her whispering to Georgia, ‘Her dad killed her mum. How much do you have to hate someone to do that?’ I said nothing. I had heard that kind of thing before from sad little people who were unkind. But she had laughed. I heard her giggling. ‘She must have been a nagging bitch.’
I saw crimson red, and I stood up and turned round and let my fists fly. I wasn’t proud of what I did, and after we had both been hauled in front of Mr Dewhurst, who was the head of year, and Liana had been given an ice pack for her bleeding nose, I apologised to Liana. They were only silly words she had used and they couldn’t hurt me. I know the truth. My poppa loved my momma. He always said he did.
I was really scared about being expelled though, and once Liana had been excused I sat down with Mr Dewhurst and tried my best to convince him that I was truly sorry.
If you really want something you have to work hard at it. That was the first time I got to know Mr Dewhurst better.
Poppa was still talking in the kitchen, brushing toast crumbs off his shirtfront. ‘You’re going to be taking a look at all departments – sales, finance, the architects’ office – then we’ll go and see some sites across London. You’ll get the full picture of how this industry works – the good guys and the bad guys, the highs and the lows.’
‘Bad guys?’ I asked.
‘You’re making it sound like the Wild West,’ Helene said. ‘Your dad’s hardly the gunslinger swaggering into town. You’re a special, nice, wonderful girl, Alice, I’m sure you’ll smash it.’
I smiled, because I am a forgiving person, but this was so typically Helene! It was a dig, a jabbing reminder of my privilege, of our money, of my elite education and my instant internship because Poppa was the boss. Sometimes I thought Helene didn’t appreciate that Momma died in fear and pain – what’s privileged about that?
‘Come on, Alice, we can’t be late on our first day,’ Poppa said.
‘Break a leg,’ Helene added as we left.
Poppa drove. I have no fear of cars, but I have a big fear of drowning. That would be like, unbearable, literally. It was no surprise, I suppose, considering what happened to Momma. Mr Dewhurst’s fear was drowning too. We had so much in common!
Poppa once said to me when I was little that the worst thing that could happen had happened to me, and so I would never have to go through it again.
I have chosen to believe that. I have lived my life since Momma’s death with that in mind – the worst is over. The best is yet to come.
CHAPTER 6
Helene
Seven weeks and three days before
I hadn’t been sleeping well for days and I was making mistakes – changing into the kind of distracted person I used to have no time for. Yesterday I lost my keys. I met a friend in a local coffee shop to talk about a fundraising event she wanted help with. The place was too crowded, with pushchairs being shoved past stools, and our conversation was often interrupted by the squawks of babies until a headache was drilling through my skull. I was keen to get home, but once outside the house I couldn’t find my keys. I had to get the neighbour to let me in using her spare set. Once inside I spent a long time staring at my handbag with its baggy opening, thinking about the ease with which someone could have taken them, the vague sense in the café of someone being behind me, of a sunhat scraping my shoulder …
Did I need to change the locks on the front door? As soon as I had the thought I dismissed it. Pull yourself together, I intoned, you’re becoming a nervous wreck. Keys get lost, life goes on.
I splashed some water on my face, opened my laptop and went back to my emails. But the feeling of something being out of place remained. Knowing that Maggie and others I had paid were out there, somewhere, didn’t help. It made me feel I was being watched. At work I couldn’t settle. I wandered the office corridors, sensitised to the ping of texts and the tapping of computer keyboards. I dropped in on Gabe’s secretary more than I needed to – Soraya was always polite but distant, as if I was an irritating junior employee out to trouble the chief. She promptly apologised when Gabe was on a site visit with Peter Fairweather, the smooth-chinned boss of Partridger, an American building company. If Gabe was in his office he looked up from his desk, the phone often clamped to his ear, leaving his head cocked at the side, and smiled at me, an eyebrow rising into a question mark. He was silently asking ‘What can I do for you? How can I be of help?’
And I smiled and shook my head and shrugged my shoulders and retreated.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, I was terrified of what I might find. I was a coward, hiring Maggie Malone to do my dirty work for me. I thought I was a woman who acted, who stood up for herself, who trod her own path, however you want to express it, but that was before I fell in love. Love changed everything. I was very scared about whether I could live without him.
I glimpsed Alice, so formal in her dark skirt and buttoned-up blouse, hunched in the corner of the meeting room scribbling notes, a collection of much older men gathered round a table getting animated. Gabe was head of the table, the finance meeting was running over. He looked tired and drawn from this angle. Work was certainly stressful at the moment, but was it also something else?
I was scared because of Alice. I loved Alice. She was not my biological child, I couldn’t have children, and I hadn’t known her as a young child, but it mattered not at all. She was my life, my sun and my future. Sweet, damaged Alice. What I saw in that cloakroom at the Café Royal upended my world, but Alice had her world destroyed in that car crash, and it had been long in the making to fix it again.
Alice adored her dad. With one parent gone, she had attached herself completely to the other. That was hardly unusual or surprising and it was not for me to damage that union, but I used to have principles: be truthful, be proud, be strong. Love unconditionally, love whoever you want. I was aware that I had become a middle-aged woman mired in compromise.
Alice’s internship with the company was one such compromise – she’d walked right in to the job because Gabe could not refuse anything she asked for. They didn’t see the thousands of letters and emails I got from less fortunate young kids, desperate for a leg up, a break. Alice was cosseted in privilege and connections, with a grade-A education – she was fearsomely bright – and natural drive, and I couldn’t say no. I saw her little pout that starts when she is disappointed or annoyed, and Gabe gave in as quickly as I did. She had experienced so much upheaval for one so young, and my inner tigress roared – make an exception for her! Break yourself on the wheel for her!
She cast a spell over her dad, a spell over me too, I suppose. He had fought so hard to give his daughter solid foundations beneath her feet and in two hours – at lunchtime – I was heading back to the Blue and White, back to the snoopers who had the power to take it all away. That woman in the Café Royal was a threat to my family, to what I have tried so hard to create. Only by knowing more can I understand how to protect what I love the most. And I would do anything, absolutely anything, to protect what I love.
CHAPTER 7
Alice
Seven weeks and three days before
I’d been at GWM – that’s short for Gabe Walter Moreau – for two days, and I’d tried really hard to remember the names of a ton of people. I shook hands wherever I went, introduced myself and smiled at everyone. I surreptitiously snapped photos of people on my phone and added names later, so that I didn’t make any mistakes. I hated making mistakes.
On my first day Poppa handed me over to a man named James and he showed me all aspects of the business. A lot of the office is open plan and I eavesdropped like a pro! Of course a lot of my time was spent filing, but I expected that. Some people might think that was boring but I got to skim read a lot of stuff – I was a fast reader and a quick learner and I didn’t mind at all.
Sometimes I saw a huddle of people laughing by the water cooler outside Poppa’s office. One time I came out under the pretence of getting a drink of water, but really I had wanted to join in, but they smiled politely when I arrived and moved away. The same thing happened today. They knew I was the boss’s daughter, so of course I understood. I just needed to work harder to win them over.
A little later that day James showed me the design studio where they mocked up beautiful images of finished property projects – line-drawn people standing by small-scale shrubbery in front of plate glass – when he got excited and picked up a magazine from a table. ‘Look, it’s Oblomov and his wife.’ A cluster of people nearby began commenting on the Russian property tycoon and his wife. ‘Hot doesn’t begin to cover it’, ‘film star looks’, ‘silver fox’, ‘the wife’s a bit plain’ and ‘mumsy’ were bandied about.
I smiled. Best not to mention that Arkady Oblomov and Irina were coming to Helene’s charity fundraiser in a few weeks. I’d never met them, but he was a competitor of Poppa’s for the Vauxhall development site and had lost out because he had bid too low. Poppa had celebrated winning, but he hadn’t crowed, he’s not mean-spirited or cruel like these gossips here, he has always been respectful of Arkady and kept his doors always open to friends and business colleagues alike. I looked at the series of gaudy colour photos of the two of them in a large room with aggressively polished furniture.
All I could think was that Arkady was very handsome and his wife was well, less so, but I was at work and I wanted to be positive! ‘He’s amazing looking,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so how did that Soviet carthorse snag him?’ someone scoffed.
‘Maybe he actually loves her,’ I said defiantly. I looked up from the magazine and saw that everyone was staring at me and no one agreed. When does cynicism take hold in a heart? How old do you have to be to think love is a lie and marriage a transaction?
I argued with my friend Lily about it too. I told Lily when we were lying around on my bed one afternoon that I was saving myself for the perfect man. She doubled over with amusement, her long dark hair sweeping along the carpet. I didn’t see what was so funny. It wasn’t something to be given away cheaply, I told Lily. When I found him our love would be magnificent. It would be perfect. I didn’t like things that weren’t perfect. For a while I had thought Mr Dewhurst was such a man.
Lily snorted. ‘You’ll be waiting a lifetime and then some,’ she said.
Lily’s parents were divorced. I was sure that’s why she had such a jaundiced view of something so pure and important.
‘And anyway,’ Lily said, her face crumpled into a mischievous grin, ‘for all you know maybe you’ll fall in love with a woman.’
We squealed as if scandalised and rolled around on the bed.
Lily said she heard her mum having sex with her new boyfriend and asked whether I heard Poppa and Helene doing it.
‘Never!’ I lied. Truth was, I had heard them having sex. The violent, animal tone of it chilled me to the bone. I saw myself in a dark, meat-filled room, bloody carcasses touching my bare skin and making me recoil. It sounded like pain, it was a ritual I didn’t understand, something denied me that made me angry. I would cover my head tightly with a pillow, hearing the roar of noise of my own thoughts inside my head. When I dared take the pillow away, the air cooled the tears on my cheeks.
Funny. I hadn’t heard them having sex lately.
I was brought back to the design studio by James taking me to do more filing in the accounts department.
CHAPTER 8
Alice
Seven weeks and three days before
I was in Poppa’s office sitting on a little fabric-covered chair in the corner, listening and learning. I was taking lots of notes, it was important to be able to keep a record.
There were three men in there with Poppa, the finance director and two lawyers. They were arguing about liabilities going forward and loan payments and due dates on the Connaught Tower development.
